Ted Grant

At
the peak of the economic growth of the USSR, in 1965, cracks
appeared in
the planned economy revealing that the burden of the privileged caste
and
bureaucratic mismanagement was becoming more and more unbearable. Ted
Grant
explained the reasons for this crisis and the futility of the attempts
to solve
it without restoring workers’ democracy.

In 1965 tensions rose between Pakistan and India around the issue of Kashmir. A provocation by Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan led to open conflict and a victory for the Indian bourgeoisie. In this article, published in October 1965, Ted Grant showed how the war was reactionary on both sides.

In June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the USSR. The treacherous policies of Stalin enforced in the non-aggression pact with Hitler of August 1939 were wiped away and the Soviet bureaucracy was thrown into panic. Overnight the Communist International changed its policy from one of opposition to imperialist war to one of collaboration with the democratic nations in the war against fascism. Ted Grant explains the Marxist position back in July 1941.

As part of a general attempt to slander
revolutionary ideas as pro-Nazi, the Labour Party's newspaper, Daily Herald, ‘accidentally' included
the report on the trial of the Minneapolis General Drivers' Union, also leaders
of the Socialist Workers' Party (Fourth International), into a report of the
trial of 33 German spies. Here is the vibrant protest of the Workers'
International League, by Ted Grant.

At the end of the war, the tremendous psychological shock occasioned by the events of the war, the collaboration of the bourgeoisie of the defeated countries with the Nazi invaders, had undermined the former habitual acceptance of bourgeois domination over the nation. As Ted Grant wrote in 1944, "The problem of the German revolution cannot be separated from the problem of the revolution in all Europe. The war has tied the fate of all the European countries together. Events in one will have immediate repercussions in all the others."